Left: the author (standing) with shipmates on Alaska Eagle during the 1981/82 Whitbread Race as they finally rounded Cape Horn after a slow plod through the Southern Ocean. In her first guise as Flyer the Sparkman & Stephens 65-footer won the previous race in 1977/78 but by the next edition the first lighter, faster designs were appearing capable of much higher daily runs through the Southern Ocean… demoralising for crews on the earlier heavy designs; no fewer than 29 yachts started the round-the-world race that year. During the first race in 1973/74 Dominique Guillet, co-skipper of 33 Export (above), was one of three competitors lost overboard. The 58ft hard-chine André Mauric design would finish the race in 12th overall on handicap… 42 days behind race-winner Sayula II
I
would like to pose a question, one that I know in advance will not have a suitable answer. Here is the ques- tion: which is the tougher event, the Whitbread Round the World Race or the Volvo Ocean Race? Yes, I know they are both the same event, but are
they really the same race? The Whitbread ran from its inception in the early 1970s until Volvo came onboard as title sponsor in 2005, and the race has evolved from a raw adventure to the world’s premiere fully crewed offshore ocean race. The reason I say that I am not expecting
a suitable answer is because the two events are now so completely different it’s hard to compare. To really understand how tough things were, or are, you need perspective. You need to have done an early race to fully appreciate what a pioneering event the Whitbread was, and you also need to be doing the current race to get an idea of what it’s like to be at the cutting edge, racing a machine the likes of which could not even have been imagined back then. I am posing this question as someone
who participated in three Whitbread races in the 1980s. In ’81/82 I raced aboard the American entry Alaska Eagle, or Alaska Beagle as the rest of the fleet called us because the boat was a dog. Four years
later I raced aboard Drum with Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon, and in ’89 I raced the first leg aboard Fazisi, the first and by happenstance last Whitbread entry from the Soviet Union. By the time Fazisi finished the race the Soviet Union had collapsed and some in the media specu- lated that it was global sporting events like the Whitbread that played no small part in bringing down that monolith. When I joined Alaska Eagle I was a
wet-behind-the-ears 23-year-old. I joined for the adventure and I figured that it would be a good way to meet girls, and it delivered on both counts. We had a multi- national crew of 10 mostly inexperienced sailors with the exception of Skip Novak, our skipper, who had done the previous Whitbread as navigator aboard King’s Legend. We slept in cabins, yes, cabins with bunks and lee cloths, and we had wine with dinner and I don’t mind saying that we had a lot of wine with dinner. It was a different era. We weren’t truly
sure that the world wasn’t flat and that we wouldn’t find ourselves on the area of the chart labelled ‘Here Be Dragons’. The wine with dinner was good, as were
the Sunday roasts, but there was a massive downside to having so much alcohol onboard, aside from the very obvious.
Our chef (yes, he was a real chef
hijacked from a restaurant in Ibiza) was a raging alcoholic, as were a number of the crew, and it all started to unravel when somewhere in the Southern Ocean we discovered that the chef had drunk all the supplies. The following two weeks were drying-out hell for a number of the crew. That was definitely no way to race a boat but, as I said, it was a different era. To make matters worse New Zealand
threw party after party for all the Whit- bread crews and that was all fun until Christmas morning, the day before the start, when we discovered that one of our crew had literally lost his mind. The drying-out period, followed by exces-
sive imbibing once on land, did a number on him. We found him pacing the boat giving a political speech to a nervous yet somewhat intrigued audience. He was foaming at the mouth. Luckily it was Christmas morning and there were few people around. We rushed him to hospital, he was later trans- ferred to a mental hospital and finally came around long after Alaska Eagle had finished the race back in England. There is, I think, a single sentence that
marked the turning point of the event from a race for a band of adventurous misfits, to a full-on professional event. It was New
SEAHORSE 37 w
JONATHAN EASTLAND/ALAMY
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